With digital advancements, customer experience trends will be continually shaped. By encouraging AI chatbots, predictive analysis, video marketing, personalized and coherent communication, companies can now explore new paths to engage their customers. They are constantly developing opportunities to strengthen customer relationships and foster customer loyalty. To stay ahead, companies must make customer experience their top priority.
The best customer experience (CX) practices are no longer just nice to implement; they are rather a crucial element of marketing success. CX technologies and trends are advancing rapidly, and while this is part of their strength, rapid evolution can also complicate navigating CX trends and determining which ones best suit your brand.
To help you see more clearly and focus on CX practices with the most promising potential, here are the key digital CX trends worth mastering.
1) Personalized Content
Today more than ever, customers carefully assess the brands they choose to do business with. After experiencing new ways of shopping and engaging with companies during the COVID-19 pandemic, they have seen what exceptional CX looks like – and many won’t settle for anything less. Personalization offers a powerful way to connect with your audience on their terms, recognize their unique preferences, and acknowledge that the customer journey is no longer linear.
Bridging this gap is easier said than done. From a content perspective, personalization technology requires you to create content at scale, modularize all that content, ensure it is tagged with appropriate metadata, and pre-configure all necessary integrations. You also need to navigate a learning curve as you master personalization practices and technology.
The best way to start personalizing your brand’s content is to define a clear personalization strategy rather than making ad hoc or case-by-case decisions. To do this, you need to identify the personalization triggers that fit your brand, considering when and how your customers can most benefit from personalized and useful information. From there, it will be much easier to make strategically sound decisions not only on the content you deliver but also on the CX digital technology that delivers it.
2) Conversational Experiences
Not only do customers want brands to approach them in a personalized manner, but they also seek a more conversational experience. This is largely due to the influence of messaging apps, whose popularity skyrocketed during the pandemic.
According to Zendesk’s 2021 report on customer experience trends, the use of messaging apps on platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger soared to approximately 2.2 billion monthly users worldwide. Now, customers interact with brands as if they are chatting with their friends and family. Moreover, they expect these conversations to be just as convenient and personal.
Many brands use chatbots to engage their customers on these same apps or on their websites. When implemented properly, chatbots can create an enriching digital CX. However, many interactions with chatbots still seem unnatural and lack relevance and human warmth. Without the right investment in technology and strategy, you could inadvertently create conversations that do not reflect the brand or meet customer expectations.
That said, chatbots can still benefit from natural language processing, allowing them to more accurately perceive customers’ intentions and provide the right responses. Conversational AI also facilitates understanding customers’ sentiments and provides highly relevant answers to their questions across multiple channels, including (but not limited to) chatbots on messaging apps.
However, the success of conversational experiences depends on your team’s ability to proactively address some common challenges. Like any good personalization strategy, an exceptional conversational AI or chatbot experience must have access to a large volume of high-quality data. AI also depends on the right training model to deliver the expected outcome. Developing the right model for a truly engaging AI experience can take time, domain-specific expertise, and the right scale.
3) Predictive Artificial Intelligence
While AI plays a crucial role in creating a conversational experience, it is also a key trend in customer experience as a whole. Learning how to leverage AI for a winning CX is a set of skills that will only become more central to how brands engage customers in the future.
For example, customers already place great importance on self-service options that allow them to solve their own problems and access resources independently. However, this underpins the desire to feel understood and that the company will meet their changing needs.
In the future, brands may turn to AI-based technology to proactively uncover deeper customer needs and preferences. By collecting rich customer data in the form of complaints, questions, feedback, and other types of comments via chatbots and other touchpoints, brands can develop a much more sophisticated understanding of who their customers are and what they want. They can then use this information to create relevant content and conversational experiences that meet customers precisely where they are.
Maintaining such relationships with your audience is essential for creating lasting customer loyalty, but doing so successfully also presents a scalability challenge. AI can not only help you gather the necessary data to quickly identify customer pain points as they evolve but also engage customers with a personal touch at the required scale. Ultimately, your team can use AI to map, orchestrate, and support your customers’ journey at every step of the process.
There are a variety of factors to keep in mind here as well. Your team needs to ensure both choosing the right AI tools to enable this approach and developing mastery in their use. Consider dipping a toe in the water with a smaller pilot project rather than jumping straight into the deep end with an entire enterprise, especially if your marketing team and the business as a whole do not yet have significant expertise in AI. By scoring a significant win with a smaller AI project to start, your team can build momentum towards progressively more ambitious CX innovations.
4) Total Experience
Brands have focused heavily on CX in recent years, and rightfully so. However, employee experience (EX) is also becoming increasingly important from a business perspective and beginning to converge with CX. Industry experts call this trend Total Experience (TX), a strategy that integrates the experiences of employees, customers, and users to accelerate growth.
Since companies rely on fully engaged employees to provide superior CX, many brands are turning to many of the same technologies listed above to also improve the workplace experience. For example, some companies already provide employees with access to self-service chatbots or AI assistants that can respond to customer questions and requests in real time. Just as customers use self-service chatbots to get the resources they need, so do employees. AI assistants and other tools have the potential to break down organizational silos, provide quick assistance to their human counterparts, and help them work more effectively in remote environments.
This innovation can even begin to help address another scalability issue: employee overload. It’s no secret that marketing organizations create exceptional content with lean teams. Now, leveraging the right combination of technology and external partners can unload your team. Companies in many sectors have achieved this through the use of automation and self-service tools, like those described earlier. However, these are far from the only solutions that have a significant impact on employee experience.
Although TX is still an emerging trend, it deserves to be explored here and now. According to CMSWire, the stage is set for Total Experience to be a determining factor in an organization’s post-pandemic success. Making progress in this area can be valuable from a branding perspective, as customers have clearly indicated that they care about how companies treat their employees. It can also unleash employees’ creativity and enable your marketing team to create truly exceptional content that resonates with your customers and advances the company’s customer experience.
Understanding the Biggest Trends in Digital Customer Experience
Customer experience is a content experience. In this light, updating your team’s knowledge on CX trends and practices can help pave the way for the best return on investment. Personalization, conversational experiences, AI, and delivery can all play a role in customer experience in the future. By exploring what these CX approaches have to offer, you can position your brand to create meaningful and lasting relationships with your customers in the future.